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Refuge
Literary Nonfiction. Essays. California Interest. Women's Studies. REFUGE is a book of lyric essays about a young woman's life as a budding writer and an international development and aid worker. Spanning twelve years and multiple continents, it focuses in large part on her advocacy and theater work with refugees. From crossing the border into one of Syria's refugee camps in 2013; to an interview with a man who fled Aleppo for the peace and security of Sweden in 2015; to working in a sustainable forestry foundation near Siberia in 2003; to taking the train from Mongolia to China to visit the home and wife of an exiled writer in 2008; to founding a self-sustaining theater project with Congolese refugee women in a slum of Nairobi in 2013; to finding George Oppen's old typewriter in the attic of a farmhouse in Maine in 2004; to working as a nude model for artists' groups in college--the work these lyric essays illuminates is that of a twenty-something year old woman trying to find herself and her world by putting her body in places, within boundaries, others might not ever consider stepping foot inside of.
246 pages, Paperback
Published June 25, 2018
30 people want to read
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March 31, 2021
Look, I agonized over whether to award this title 4 stars or 5 (“Agonized”? Padma? Seriously? Over a Goodreads review?) Looking at it from a 4-stars perspective, it seems too important, too relevant, too finely wrought, too honest, not to be given 5 stars. But from a 5-star perspective, there is one, big irritating flaw, along with a handful of minor flaws, that would easily be enough to give a lesser work 4 stars instead. But this is not a lesser work, so take my 4 stars with a handful of kosher flakes and chuck it behind your left shoulder to ward off my Virgo devil of nitpickishness.
Let me make this very clear. Ming Lauren Holden’s “Refuge: A Memoir” is about an important a book of non-fiction I’ve read since encountering Loren Eiseley’s “The Star-Thrower,” and the most important example of travel-writing I’ve read since discovering the several intoxications of Nikos Kazantzakis’s accounts of his several journeys as an exile from his beloved Greece. As autobiographical material, it also stands high, though not as high as, say, Kazantzakis’s monumental “Report to Greco” or the diaries of Anaïs Nin. All this qualified, and said, and heartfelt, “Refuge” is a work of grace and intelligence that will make you, the reader, a better person for the reading of it.
Why do I like it as much as I do? Because in Holden’s work I see the most essential parts of myself, which is to say that I see the essential humanity that makes us whole, or offers us wholeness. I see a liminal being who is not bound to a single world-view, unless that view be love: she ends her penultimate chapter, about her time spent working in Bolivia, quoting the last words of a physician whose efforts she was furthering, “It’s all for love,” a paragraph which concludes, “I hope that in some ways it is all any of us ever say.” Ming is a person who is not trapped by any dogma that I can see, be it religious or political or personal, and because of that she does not stand in judgment or look down her nose, although that in itself is some indication of where she might stand politically, if pressed, which in turn might give insight to her spirituality.
There is an annoying typo on page 70. That is one flaw. These things stick out like sore thumbs to me.
As a younger woman in her twenties, Ming Holden traveled into pockets of planet Earth where human beings suffered from political and sexual violence, malnutrition, poverty and ostracization, in order to offer humanitarian comfort. She worked with refugees in Assad’s Syria, who were squeezed between Assad, ISIS and Russian bombing; she worked with Congolese refugees in Kenya, women who had endured privations and acts of cruelty almost beyond imagining—but that she wouldn’t let us not imagine; she spent time in Mongolia and Russia, too, listening deeply. “Refuge” might easily have been a screed, an expulsion of outrage, a call to arms. But that would have been too easy, and Holden seems to understand that, much as she understands her own limitations. “Refuge” is not a book of advocacy: she is very clear that she does not presume to speak for anyone else. She writes: “Even worse than a tragic hero, is a hero of any sort.”
Yet, she writes, “The bone hands roped with vein.” Born, and again living, in the American West, as I have most of my life, when I read “roped,” I read “encircled.” One has “roped” a calf, or a mustang. “Roped” means a noose of sorts, though usually one that hasn’t killed you. It’s a round thing. One might be roped into an unwanted marriage, or a plea-deal that keeps you from serving time, even if you were guilty of neither the crime nor the lesser charge you pled to. So, “roped” seemed the wrong word to me. Veins do not encircle: perhaps “netted” or “criss-crossed” or “meandered,” but not “roped.”
Yet, she also writes, “I didn’t do much. I could have done more,” and, “I have not done enough.” She feels the love that is extended to her, but she is almost ashamed of it, in her smallness, in the very ineffectualness of being such a small thing in such a very vast world. She knows that she is not a match for what she is up against.
And yet, she gives us this:
“And on the bleached bones
You listened to the sobbing wind.
Watch out for her; she can give you dreams.”
Ming Holden is alive. She sleeps with people she “knows” she shouldn’t, but that’s not the sort of knowledge that matters to her, imposed as it is from outside her own heart. “But I loved my body,” she declares early on, signaling that the pleasure of being alive isn’t sinful or wretched and, besides, that’s not what the book is really about: it’s just incidental, it’s a fact, it’s a landscape she inhabited in these moments. Feeling a penis inside her for the first time after a suffocating relationship with another woman, and the revelation that it felt good to her … and the confession that rough sex was painful … and that the pressing of one human body to another is a special kind of ecstasy, these are not moments of bravado, they are not titillating, so much as they are an admission that the erotic is part of the fulness of being. Ming Holden is a world traveler, not a jet-setter, but also not a wife, not a domestic, not a person attached to a single place or person. Her work is too holy to hold such attachments. That she is honest about such intimate things tells me that she is certain within herself, and knowable to us. She hears cries from other continents, the weeping of a woman forced to make a stew of her own brother—this is the stuff of Greek tragedy, the story of Tantalus, the Curse on the House of Atreus. No husband or wife has a voice that can touch her so deeply.
Ming Holden does descend, in her most important chapter, “Jacqueline and the Negative Imagination,” into an unnecessary discourse about the post-modern and something she calls the “post-human.” This is the one great flaw I spoke of at the beginning, the flaw without which I would have given the 5 stars this book otherwise so deserved. And I am very conscious of my own nobodiness, my insignificance and the insignificance of my opinions concerning her. This star-ranking should not concern her, and yet it is honest for me to bring it up. It is Jacqueline who was forced to cook her own brother, who, through Ming’s project, establishing a theater troupe—The Survival Girls—for Congoese women refugees, created a play about her own multiple rapes escaping Congo and who insisted on playing the men who raped her. Her discourse on postmodernism and posthumanism may have been prophylactic, protective, a way to distance herself intellectually from the raw material of Jacqueline’s story, and I get that. And I get that addressing one’s own psychological vulnerability when faced with such lurid horror by intellectualizing it, dressing it up in academic folderal, was likely therapeutic. Yet, still, it was this: folderal, palatable to her academic brethren perhaps, but I would have liked Jacqueline’s story without its distraction, its interference. Ming addresses her own “weaknesses” frankly throughout, except for this one. And frankly, the weaknesses she does admit to are not, in my mind, real weaknesses, only concessions to a judgmental and insulated world that does not care to see what she cannot help but examine.
Which brings me to a point of anger, a moment that surprised me in its visceral actuality, in which a man, a scholastic colleague of hers, observes that her own PTSD in confronting these situations is palpable in the texts she writes. She notes how irritating it was that he would “diagnose” her, especially as she suspects that he may have been right. Because I don’t think he was right. I think she faltered, but who among us who breathes, and loves, and has a pulse or any modicum of love for the human species, would not falter at Jacqueline’s biography? or her courage in playing her own rapist? I gave Ming 4 stars because I did not want her to falter, as I would have done, because I wanted to see something in her something I could never expect from myself. I was angry, not because her own humanity got the better of her, but because of the presumption of her classmate that it should not have.
I will say this, having no idea if Ming Lauren Holden has any background to speak of in Vajrayana Buddhism. There is a path of being, a commitment that some people make, of becoming a Bodhisattva, one who pledges not to enter Nirvana (Heaven) until all others have entered before her. One practice on the Bodhisattva path is the meditation known as Tonglen, in which one consumes or “breathes in” the evils of the world, draws them into herself, and in the breathing-out exhales love. Ming writes often of feeling porous. Ming is not one to look away from suffering: she looks into its eyes. If she is not a student of Vajrayana, she practices Tonglen nevertheless. Hers is the body of compassion, and her voice is the voice of Love.
My four stars point to a failing within myself, not to a failing in her. And let me point out, in conclusion, that "Refuge" is not mere journalism. It is a work of art; her love for the language is tender, acute and penetrating.
Let me make this very clear. Ming Lauren Holden’s “Refuge: A Memoir” is about an important a book of non-fiction I’ve read since encountering Loren Eiseley’s “The Star-Thrower,” and the most important example of travel-writing I’ve read since discovering the several intoxications of Nikos Kazantzakis’s accounts of his several journeys as an exile from his beloved Greece. As autobiographical material, it also stands high, though not as high as, say, Kazantzakis’s monumental “Report to Greco” or the diaries of Anaïs Nin. All this qualified, and said, and heartfelt, “Refuge” is a work of grace and intelligence that will make you, the reader, a better person for the reading of it.
Why do I like it as much as I do? Because in Holden’s work I see the most essential parts of myself, which is to say that I see the essential humanity that makes us whole, or offers us wholeness. I see a liminal being who is not bound to a single world-view, unless that view be love: she ends her penultimate chapter, about her time spent working in Bolivia, quoting the last words of a physician whose efforts she was furthering, “It’s all for love,” a paragraph which concludes, “I hope that in some ways it is all any of us ever say.” Ming is a person who is not trapped by any dogma that I can see, be it religious or political or personal, and because of that she does not stand in judgment or look down her nose, although that in itself is some indication of where she might stand politically, if pressed, which in turn might give insight to her spirituality.
There is an annoying typo on page 70. That is one flaw. These things stick out like sore thumbs to me.
As a younger woman in her twenties, Ming Holden traveled into pockets of planet Earth where human beings suffered from political and sexual violence, malnutrition, poverty and ostracization, in order to offer humanitarian comfort. She worked with refugees in Assad’s Syria, who were squeezed between Assad, ISIS and Russian bombing; she worked with Congolese refugees in Kenya, women who had endured privations and acts of cruelty almost beyond imagining—but that she wouldn’t let us not imagine; she spent time in Mongolia and Russia, too, listening deeply. “Refuge” might easily have been a screed, an expulsion of outrage, a call to arms. But that would have been too easy, and Holden seems to understand that, much as she understands her own limitations. “Refuge” is not a book of advocacy: she is very clear that she does not presume to speak for anyone else. She writes: “Even worse than a tragic hero, is a hero of any sort.”
Yet, she writes, “The bone hands roped with vein.” Born, and again living, in the American West, as I have most of my life, when I read “roped,” I read “encircled.” One has “roped” a calf, or a mustang. “Roped” means a noose of sorts, though usually one that hasn’t killed you. It’s a round thing. One might be roped into an unwanted marriage, or a plea-deal that keeps you from serving time, even if you were guilty of neither the crime nor the lesser charge you pled to. So, “roped” seemed the wrong word to me. Veins do not encircle: perhaps “netted” or “criss-crossed” or “meandered,” but not “roped.”
Yet, she also writes, “I didn’t do much. I could have done more,” and, “I have not done enough.” She feels the love that is extended to her, but she is almost ashamed of it, in her smallness, in the very ineffectualness of being such a small thing in such a very vast world. She knows that she is not a match for what she is up against.
And yet, she gives us this:
“And on the bleached bones
You listened to the sobbing wind.
Watch out for her; she can give you dreams.”
Ming Holden is alive. She sleeps with people she “knows” she shouldn’t, but that’s not the sort of knowledge that matters to her, imposed as it is from outside her own heart. “But I loved my body,” she declares early on, signaling that the pleasure of being alive isn’t sinful or wretched and, besides, that’s not what the book is really about: it’s just incidental, it’s a fact, it’s a landscape she inhabited in these moments. Feeling a penis inside her for the first time after a suffocating relationship with another woman, and the revelation that it felt good to her … and the confession that rough sex was painful … and that the pressing of one human body to another is a special kind of ecstasy, these are not moments of bravado, they are not titillating, so much as they are an admission that the erotic is part of the fulness of being. Ming Holden is a world traveler, not a jet-setter, but also not a wife, not a domestic, not a person attached to a single place or person. Her work is too holy to hold such attachments. That she is honest about such intimate things tells me that she is certain within herself, and knowable to us. She hears cries from other continents, the weeping of a woman forced to make a stew of her own brother—this is the stuff of Greek tragedy, the story of Tantalus, the Curse on the House of Atreus. No husband or wife has a voice that can touch her so deeply.
Ming Holden does descend, in her most important chapter, “Jacqueline and the Negative Imagination,” into an unnecessary discourse about the post-modern and something she calls the “post-human.” This is the one great flaw I spoke of at the beginning, the flaw without which I would have given the 5 stars this book otherwise so deserved. And I am very conscious of my own nobodiness, my insignificance and the insignificance of my opinions concerning her. This star-ranking should not concern her, and yet it is honest for me to bring it up. It is Jacqueline who was forced to cook her own brother, who, through Ming’s project, establishing a theater troupe—The Survival Girls—for Congoese women refugees, created a play about her own multiple rapes escaping Congo and who insisted on playing the men who raped her. Her discourse on postmodernism and posthumanism may have been prophylactic, protective, a way to distance herself intellectually from the raw material of Jacqueline’s story, and I get that. And I get that addressing one’s own psychological vulnerability when faced with such lurid horror by intellectualizing it, dressing it up in academic folderal, was likely therapeutic. Yet, still, it was this: folderal, palatable to her academic brethren perhaps, but I would have liked Jacqueline’s story without its distraction, its interference. Ming addresses her own “weaknesses” frankly throughout, except for this one. And frankly, the weaknesses she does admit to are not, in my mind, real weaknesses, only concessions to a judgmental and insulated world that does not care to see what she cannot help but examine.
Which brings me to a point of anger, a moment that surprised me in its visceral actuality, in which a man, a scholastic colleague of hers, observes that her own PTSD in confronting these situations is palpable in the texts she writes. She notes how irritating it was that he would “diagnose” her, especially as she suspects that he may have been right. Because I don’t think he was right. I think she faltered, but who among us who breathes, and loves, and has a pulse or any modicum of love for the human species, would not falter at Jacqueline’s biography? or her courage in playing her own rapist? I gave Ming 4 stars because I did not want her to falter, as I would have done, because I wanted to see something in her something I could never expect from myself. I was angry, not because her own humanity got the better of her, but because of the presumption of her classmate that it should not have.
I will say this, having no idea if Ming Lauren Holden has any background to speak of in Vajrayana Buddhism. There is a path of being, a commitment that some people make, of becoming a Bodhisattva, one who pledges not to enter Nirvana (Heaven) until all others have entered before her. One practice on the Bodhisattva path is the meditation known as Tonglen, in which one consumes or “breathes in” the evils of the world, draws them into herself, and in the breathing-out exhales love. Ming writes often of feeling porous. Ming is not one to look away from suffering: she looks into its eyes. If she is not a student of Vajrayana, she practices Tonglen nevertheless. Hers is the body of compassion, and her voice is the voice of Love.
My four stars point to a failing within myself, not to a failing in her. And let me point out, in conclusion, that "Refuge" is not mere journalism. It is a work of art; her love for the language is tender, acute and penetrating.
June 1, 2019
Minority opinion here, but I did not like this book even though I not only expected to like it, I wanted to like it.
I expected to read about refugees, not about a twenty-something finding herself. Perhaps I should have expected as much from the subtitle, "A Memoir." At times it was interesting how she contrasted the conditions she was currently in with her previous life in California. However, the focus was on her, not on the individuals she was supposedly there to help. Honestly, I sped read the last 20 pages -- especially after the escapade in Bolivia.
I expected to read about refugees, not about a twenty-something finding herself. Perhaps I should have expected as much from the subtitle, "A Memoir." At times it was interesting how she contrasted the conditions she was currently in with her previous life in California. However, the focus was on her, not on the individuals she was supposedly there to help. Honestly, I sped read the last 20 pages -- especially after the escapade in Bolivia.
March 21, 2022
Beautiful writing. Lyrical prose. But it wasn't always clear to me how the sections fit together.
September 17, 2018
I love this book so much - it illuminates parts of the world we don't get to see very often, and from an outsider's perspective that is so intimately relatable. This isn't some privileged white chick out to 'save' people in developing nations. This is a young woman with a heart that's maybe too open, too vulnerable, going out to try and be helpful to people in great pain. People that most of us don't know exist, and have trouble relating to because they're on the other side of the world. Ming puts those people in our homes with us with these stories, demanding of us deeper empathy, and giving us a window into those other lives that we'd never have otherwise.
What's also interesting to me is that each story is told in a different way, a different style. That might be disconcerting for some, but for me, it got to the heart of the issue that it's really hard to tell these stories. There are so many questions, so many facets, so many angles. I think telling each story in the way that serves the story best makes the experience richer. This should be required reading for English classes and development workers, at least.
What's also interesting to me is that each story is told in a different way, a different style. That might be disconcerting for some, but for me, it got to the heart of the issue that it's really hard to tell these stories. There are so many questions, so many facets, so many angles. I think telling each story in the way that serves the story best makes the experience richer. This should be required reading for English classes and development workers, at least.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews